Criticism mounted Saturday over a wall U.S. troops are building around a Sunni enclave surrounded by Shiite areas in Baghdad, with residents calling it "collective punishment" and the local council leader saying the community did not approve the project before construction began.Violence continued Saturday, with at least three people killed when a bomb left on a bus exploded in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood, police said. The minibus was gutted by flames and its windows shattered.Gunmen stormed a house in Kirkuk, 290 kilometers (180 miles) north of Baghdad, killing a mother, father and their two teenage daughters, police said. The victims were Kurds who had received death threats from al Qaeda-linked militants operating in the area, witnesses said.A U.S. soldier was also killed Saturday by a roadside bomb southwest of the capital, the military said.... http://www.cnn.com

A continuous stream of mortar bombs and Katyusha rockets slammed into markets and neighborhoods in Somalia's capital city Saturday, leaving at least six dead in its wake, witnesses on the ground told CNN.According to Somali journalist Mohamed Amiin, a civilian minibus was struck by the shelling, killing an unspecified number of passengers. One witness told Amiin the blast was so powerful body parts could be seen scattered in the street.The violence is part of an ongoing battle between Ethiopian troops and Islamic insurgents.Fighting has intensified in the past two days, as more Ethiopian troops arrived Friday in Mogadishu to suppress the insurgency....http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/africa/04/21/somalia/index.html?eref=rss_world

South Korea's demand that North Korea renew its commitment to dismantle its nuclear weapons program forced economic aid talks between the neighbors into overtime on Saturday. The impoverished North's priority at the talks was to receive food shipments from South Korea, but Seoul has sought to use the talks to persuade the North to implement a February promise to shut down its nuclear reactor. Meetings were still under way at the economic talks in Pyongyang late Saturday more than eight hours after their scheduled end. South Korea's chief delegate, Chin Dong-soo, said the talks would likely continue into Sunday. "Differences were narrowed on some issues, but other issues need more discussion," he told reporters. ...http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=3063720

NASA officials who examined their security measures following the deadly shooting at Virginia Tech are trying to figure out how a contract worker sneaked a handgun into the Johnson Space Center and killed another employee before shooting himself.The gunman, armed with a snub-nosed revolver, barricaded himself in a building that houses communications and tracking systems for the space shuttle. He shot and killed a man and duct-taped a woman to a chair for hours before finally shooting and killing himself, police said. The woman hostage suffered minor injuries.NASA and police identified him as 60-year-old William Phillips. He had apparently had a dispute with the slain hostage, police said."Right now we're trying to understand why this happened, how this happened," Mike Coats, director of the Johnson Space Center, said in a news conference. He said they had reviewed their procedures earlier this week because of the Virginia Tech shootings....http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-04-20-nasa-gunman_N.htm?csp=34

The commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, US General Dan McNeill, said Thursday he was unable to confirm the interception Iranian-made mortars and explosives in the country. "I don't deny that position and I'm very interested how the insurgents might be helped and who might have helped the insurgents," McNeill told reporters in the Afghan capital. "Obviously, the US Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff have far more information than I do right now," he added. General Peter Pace, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, said Tuesday that coalition forces had intercepted Iranian-made mortars and explosives in Afghanistan destined for the Taliban. After 30 years of war, Afghanistan is awash with weapons of all kinds and of different origins. Iran, in particular, furnished the Northern Alliance with weapons during their struggle against the Taliban government. Mcneill, the head of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), also said he had no hard intelligence on ...http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070419/pl_afp/usiranafghanistan

Since the end of the Vietnam War, the military's public-affairs officials have tried to rebuild the Defense Department's credibility by putting distance between themselves and Pentagon efforts that use deception, propaganda and other methods to influence foreign populations. A 2004 memo by Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, codified the separation between public affairs, which communicates with the media and the public, and "information operations," which attempts to sway people in other countries. But Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has asked for changes that would allow the two branches to work more closely together. During the Vietnam War, military news conferences were derided as the "five o'clock follies" because of misleading or irrelevant information provided to the news media....http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007704190362